


the spiders crawling in

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-17 13:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11276553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Every single day Kira drowns in two hundred feelings – and she only knows six of them – and those six on their own are so big. In the bad quiet moments she wonders if she’s even a person. Maybe she’s just all the feelings that got too big, cut out and put into the shape of a girl. Maybe she should give up trying to be a person, and just spend the rest of her life screaming the sound of someone else’s fear.





	the spiders crawling in

**Author's Note:**

> Been feelin' a lot of feelin's about Kira Manning recently. Spoilers for S5E2.
> 
> [warnings: major character death, intrusive thoughts (in that kira is feeling other people's emotions), referenced violence]

i.

Kira’s mom walks into the room and Kira’s hands clench tight around the drawing she’s made. The back of her neck is itching, like she’s wearing a sweater that’s too tight, and it’s itching with the feeling that she doesn’t belong here. That she isn’t right, that she’s going to ruin it, that everything is going to be ruined and it will be her _fault_ —

“You’re not my mum,” Kira says, because her mum has never once felt like _that_.

ii.

Kira’s been able to feel her mom for always. Mrs. S would say: _she’s out there, love, she’s fine_ and Kira would think _no,_ Kira would think _she’s so sad, S, sad like drowning._ But adults like lying to her and to each other to make themselves feel better. Kira understands.

She sort of figured everyone could feel it, that everyone had their own connections. When her mum would come back Kira would say _could you feel me there_ and Sarah would squeeze her really tight, the way only she does, she’d say _‘course I could, monkey, I can always tell._ And Kira believed her, because her love and happiness would flow through Kira like sunlight. Of course her mother wouldn’t lie to her. Not about that.

But after that wool-jumper-scratch – after that – Kira starts to feel a little afraid.

iii.

She draws them, over and over, until she figures it out. Because it’s scary! Sometimes she can’t tell Cosima’s fear from Helena’s fear from her own, and that’s a scary way to live. She doesn’t like always feeling so angry. It makes her tired, and sad.

Take the red pencil and color in Cosima’s coat. Red is fear. Red is the sort of dizzy way Kira’s bones ache, sometimes, red is loneliness, red is joy and wonder and the gasped sound of _oh_ , the way Kira had felt when she’d gotten the pencil through Cosima’s piece of paper.

Take the pink pencil and color in Alison’s lips. Pink is tight-tight-tight. Pink is holding everything in, to the point that it hurts. Alison won’t stay still. She itches all over but before Kira can realize what Alison is feeling she is always – gone. Guilt, mostly. Kira doesn’t know what Alison has to feel guilty about, but she does – it’s sour and shivery and it makes Kira want to hold Alison’s hands.

Take the black pencil and draw, sharp, the down-pointing lines of Rachel’s eyebrows. Black is angry, all the time, without ever ever stopping. Sometimes sadness. Mostly anger. Glass and knives and sharp jagged things. It’s strange – the first time Kira met Rachel they were in a soft pink room, and Rachel held herself like she was trying to fold all of her sharp places in tight enough that they wouldn’t scratch. But inside she was just sharp. So sharp it hurt.

Take the gold pencil and create the soft cloud of Helena’s hair.

Helena is so lonely.

That thought deserves its own space, because that’s how Helena feels: like a space, like a well that feelings fall into and drop forever. Kira had walked to the front door and it had felt like ten miles, like every step hurt with being alone. The woman on the other side of the glass had surged with happiness, when she’d seen Kira, and that feeling had fallen and fallen and fallen and then it was gone. Eaten alive.

Her mum gets so many colors. Her mum is clear and sharp and full of love, love for Kira, love for Cal and Felix and S and her sisters. It makes Kira sad, how little of that love she saves for herself. When her mum has run off to rescue someone again – _fear anger horror determination fear fear fear_ – Kira lies awake in the dark and loves her, fiercely, as hard as she possibly can. She doesn’t think this works both ways. But maybe if she wants it enough, it will.

iv.

Kira doesn’t meet Mika until later, but she recognizes her when she sees her onscreen. She knows just how Mika feels. If she picked a colored pencil it would be purple, dark purple; purple like the shadows in the edges of Kira’s brain, the places where Mika hides. Her feelings glitch and shatter, break into each other, but they are always jumping and they are always ducking back into the dark. Like a flock of birds. Like pixels scattering. Kira has time to figure it out—

—Kira keeps thinking she’ll have time to figure it out—

—so she doesn’t push it. Mika and Kira play Minecraft together and Kira feels a glitch in her head that is like happiness, sort of. Mostly drowning in fear. Mostly tired.

“Do you ever sleep?” she says.

Kira can’t see Mika’s face behind the mask, but the fear gets sharper. Uncle Felix told Kira about dial-up, once, the endless scary whir. Mika’s fear goes on and on and on, trying to connect and not connecting.

“Not much,” Mika says quietly. “I am very busy.”

“Is it hard to fall asleep when you’re scared,” Kira says.

Happiness bursts into love bursts into fear and fear eats it all up. Mika doesn’t say anything, and then she says: “Yes.”

v.

Sometimes Kira can’t fall asleep because she’s holding someone else’s fear in her mouth. But more often Kira can’t fall asleep because she’s holding someone else’s anger in her mouth, and that’s much louder and much harder to sleep through.

In the dark she can tell them apart. Cosima like a scream building in your throat, Helena like chickenflesh burned and the sharp edge of a knife. Rachel so constant it aches, a headache, a fire. Alison’s anger rising so sudden that it makes Kira stumble, makes her afraid she’ll do something dangerous. Her mother like a lioness, like an army charging into battle. Mika’s anger crumbling into exhausted, bitter ash. Other pieces of anger: snarls from animals she doesn’t recognize, colors she can’t put names to. She tastes bitten lips even with her mouth shut. Everyone in Kira’s brain gets angry. They won’t stop.

She doesn’t think they’d want to teach it to her: anger. But she learns it anyways.

vi.

Kira’s anger is a tooth pulled out. She knows: she pulled out her own tooth, she remembers the empty space. Anger is sudden and sharp and growing out of her bones; it fills the hollows of her mouth with blood. Kira is old enough that her teeth have stopped falling out, but anger just keeps coming back over and over and over again. Her mother leaves her behind. Her mother gives her up. Her mother loses her. Kira grows teeth and then loses them, spits them out into her hand but can’t let go of them. Her mouth tastes like blood all the time. She wants Sarah to see it but Sarah won’t see it, keeps calling her _monkey_ and kissing her on the head.

Kira doesn’t blame her. Kira is angry all the time but it’s so hard to be mad at her mum because Sarah is so scared, and trying so hard. It bangs around inside of Kira’s head, it doesn’t stop, she _knows_ her mum is scared, she knows it better than anyone in the world.

Her mum leaves for an island. Kira messages Mika through the chat client, because she knows Mika will still be awake. _what do you do when you get mad_ , she types, because Mika’s anger is the only one that collapses. It’s the only one that keeps giving up.

The typing bubble pops up and goes, pops up and goes. It’s cheating, but: Kira closes her eyes and feels for Mika in the dark. Sadness fizzles like sparks on an exposed wire. It twists itself up into knots Kira can’t undo. She opens her eyes again.

 _i stay awake_ , Mika says. _i don’t know what else to do._

Then, a second later: _do you want to talk to me_

So she types it all out. She says: _you’re all so scared and i wish you’d talk to each other_ , and _i can’t hold all of you at once_ , and _how can i be my own person when you are all being me louder than i am_ , and _why is rachel so angry_ , and _why aren’t you angry_ , and _why can’t alison tell that helena’s lonely_ and _why can’t helena tell that alison’s scared_ and _why can’t my mom look at me, mika, why can’t she let me be mad at her._

She deletes it all. She swallows. She types: _my mom is going away again and i can’t do anything_. Because that’s safer. Kira told her mum about the things inside her head and Sarah said _those aren’t dreams_ , like Kira didn’t already know.

There isn’t even a bubble this time. _she’ll be okay_ , Mika says. _trust me_.

 _okay_ , Kira types, and she feels along the wires to see if Mika is lying.

vii.

Mika is lying.

viii.

Kira starts screaming before S stabs Ferdinand in the hand, but in the mad panic afterwards she can tell S is rewriting the story in her mind into something that makes sense to her. “Mom,” Kira says, over and over, “mom, mom,” and in her head her mother burns. There’s so much, it’s so loud. She screams and it isn’t loud enough. Kira’s mom flickers and flickers and almost goes out, and Rachel opens like a jagged mouth and _smiles_.

Alison and Helena are pools of still water, so Kira could go there. Mika is so scared, but it’s a fear Kira understands, and she could go there. Anywhere but Rachel, all sharp spikes in the dark. Anywhere but Cosima and Sarah, who are both blinking like eyes and closing – closing – cl—

ix.

When Kira pulled her own tooth out, when she first understood what anger was, Cosima was a dark place in her head.

It wasn’t the first time it happened – but every time it’s still terrifying. Helena goes dark a lot. After she’d pulled herself out of their basement, jagged and afraid and so happy it made Kira smile – couldn’t help it – Helena went so dark that Kira had to put a hand to her heart to make sure it was still beating. Her mum has gone out a few times before, but she always came back really fast. Rachel, at the time, had only ever gone dark once. (A bright surge of anger from her mother, sharp as a grin, and the black-sharp part of Kira’s mind had vanished.) The same with Alison: only once, something sour and dizzy building and building until it had collapsed.

But all of the sudden in Cal’s trailer Kira couldn’t breathe, and then Cosima – left. She just went away. And outside Kira’s mother was yelling, frantic, _love-anger-hope-guilt-fear_ , and Kira knew she would do anything to make that place in her head bright again.

Cosima came back. Cosima lit up in Kira’s brain like the sun seen through closed eyelids, and she came back. Rachel went dark a little bit later – _really_ dark, dark and silent – before Kira’s mom came and got her out of DYAD, but Rachel came back. Helena keeps going dark and she keeps coming back.

Kira really thought they’d all keep coming back. She didn’t think any of them would leave her.

x.

Kira and Siobhan are brought to DYAD. Siobhan puts her hand on Kira’s shoulder, and Kira blinks away her own need for sleep so she can keep feeling everyone else. Her mum is out there. Her mum is alive. Her mum isn’t dark, yet, not all the way. Cosima is lighting back up – lighting up _huge_ , like plants twisting up towards the sun warm and red and heavy with pollen. Helena and Alison are quiet. Mika out there in the dark is sending little pings of worry, and Kira tries to ping her back: _help, help, help my mother please_ —

But she already knew that wouldn’t work. They bring her deeper into the DYAD building. She reaches out hands and no one reaches back.

The last time Kira was in DYAD, they put her in a pretty pink room and they lied to her. Rachel lied to her: she pretended she wasn’t sharp. She wasn’t even trying to pretend, really – she put Kira in the soft pink room and then sat across from her and asked about Kira’s mother and Kira felt Rachel feel:

  * Angry angry angry, like she was going to take a whole book and rip it in half
  * Some sort of happiness Kira didn’t know and didn’t like. It felt like the way a cat kneads, when it’s sitting on your chest and its claws are digging into you and it hurts – and the cat knows it hurts, but won’t stop.
  * Sad. Somewhere deep deep down, all the way down—



And Rachel just kept smiling, like none of these things were real. She smiled so nicely that Kira believed, for a second, that she was making the feelings up. They could have been hers, only they weren’t.

“Did that make you sad?” Rachel asked, feeling so many things – and none of those things were caring about Kira’s answer.

 _Did that make you sad?_ Kira could have asked her. _How did you know? Do you know what it feels like when you’re sad? Or do you just know what it feels like when you’re angry? Because I know. All of it. I could tell you._

She said things that weren’t that answer. In her chest a fire kept burning, crackling underneath her skin. Rachel’s anger? Sarah’s anger? Someone else’s? Her own? Did it matter?

Does it matter?

Really. Does it matter?

xi.

Kira changes clothes inside of DYAD and feels, in the back of her brain, Rachel’s sharp edges—

Rachel—

Rachel’s sharp edges—

She blinks and puts a hand to her forehead and Rachel has changed. Cal taught Kira to do origami and showed her how you could fold the paper over, make it into something else. He warned her about papercuts. When the butterfly was finished, there weren’t any sharp edges left to cut yourself on.

“It’s alright, love,” S says, watching as Kira stops and stares into space. Kira doesn’t answer her. She checks, fast – Helena is calm, Alison is irritated, Cosima is sleeping, Mika is scared, Sarah is terrified – they’re all still alive – and then she goes back to Rachel. She’s different. Kira can’t get to her sharp edges, like they’ve been folded into something else, like they’ve drowned.

S puts her hand on Kira’s shoulder. “I know,” Kira says. Probably too late. She blinks at the DYAD lights and she blinks at Rachel in her head, who isn’t angry anymore, and she feels the strange soft curl of her own hope.

xii.

_hi sorry i left_

_are you alright kira?? what happened (_ 。 _Ó_ 人 _Ò_ 。 _)_

_i’m okay  
things are changing and i’m scared_

In the back of Kira’s brain, in the shadows, wires spark. They make a shape that looks like determination – determination like the stretch of Sarah’s muscles, like Helena leaping and then going bright and sharp with pain, like the way Cosima’s brain is going taut with resolve and sick with fear. Everyone is being very brave out there, and Kira doesn’t know how or why or what it means.

 _i can help_ , Mika says. _tell me what’s going on_.

 _it’s dyad,_ Kira says. She pauses. She types: _it’s rachel._

xiii.

She wakes up in the middle of the night and Mika is humming, terrified and hot to the touch like a mainframe. _Go to sleep_ , Kira thinks at her, grumpily, but it doesn’t work. They took Kira’s laptop away from her, so she can’t send a message to Mika that way. They’ve never met. Kira doesn’t know where she lives. If Kira was in her house she could do what S does, sometimes, when Kira stays up too late; she could close the laptop, tell Mika to drink water, tell her to go to bed. But she can’t do any of that now.

S said that Rachel said that Kira’s mum is coming home soon, and Kira believes Rachel, and she’s so scared. Everything is changing. Out there Mika is humming to the dark, and her fear sings to Kira’s fear until Kira falls asleep.

xiv.

She used to have her own dreams, probably, but she doesn’t anymore. She gets headaches. Big waves of anger and fear. When Kira explained it to her mum she tried to make it small pieces, so that Sarah wouldn’t be scared for her,

(it would be so big if Sarah was scared for her again)

(everything is always so big, mom, and I am already so scared)

but the truth is that it’s huge and it’s awful and it’s terrifying and it drowns her. Every single day Kira drowns in two hundred feelings – and she only knows six of them – and those six on their own are so big. In the bad quiet moments she wonders if she’s even a person. Maybe she’s just all the feelings that got too big, cut out and put into the shape of a girl. Maybe she should give up trying to be a person, and just spend the rest of her life screaming the sound of someone else’s fear.

She’d wanted her mom to fix it. Like a baby with a scraped knee, coming to S and crying and getting a Popsicle. _Mama I’m scared. Tell me that my problems aren’t real. Tell me the monsters under the bed get scared if I clean my room. Make it stop._

But her mom hadn’t said anything, and Kira had been forced to feel her own mother’s fear getting bigger inside her brain. How do you not cry at that?

Here is how you don’t cry at that: you get angry. And Kira couldn’t help it, she got angry. All of the teeth in her mouth, all of the blood on her tongue. _You were supposed to fix it_ , she’d thought at Sarah, _and you can’t even fix it. Now what do I do? Do I carry it? Do I be this, forever, when we don’t even know what “this” is?_

“It’s gonna be okay, monkey,” Sarah said, and her fear chased itself in circles in the dark. So it wasn’t going to be okay. Kira knew it wasn’t, because her mother told her so.

“I know,” she’d said instead, and dug in her brain with both hands to find someone else’s kindness.

xv.

_i’m coming back_

_really????? can i meet you?_  
i think i have to go do tests with rachel  
but then you can show me how you did that thing with redstone

Fear sparks. It’s huge. It whirs and clashes and glitches through Kira’s mind.

 _or not_ , she types.

The bubble comes and goes. _no_ , Mika says. _i want to meet you  
if your mother says yes  
i don’t think she likes me (_ 。 _-_ 人 _-_ 。 _)_

_i like you, mika_

Inside of Kira’s chest, lights. Love, love, love.

xvi.

Love, love, love, love, love.

xvii.

They take Kira to a van and tell her it’s time to go – even though Rachel’s sharp edges are gone and she’d smiled and talked about tests, which Kira is good at. Even though Kira got to finally walk through the doors of her school, even though she and Mika had plans to play video games, even though Kira needs to hold Helena’s babies’ hands – they’re leaving. Kira’s mother is an exhausted heartbeat in the back of her brain, Rachel is sharp smothered anger, and these things mean that Kira is leaving. The light shines off the water. Kira could stare at the sun, and that still wouldn’t be bright enough to wipe out everything that’s screaming inside of her head. It’s like that – the sun – but also a sound, and also a taste, and also things she’ll never be able to explain to anyone. Because she’s getting in a van.

The light on the water. Inside of Kira’s head Mika’s fear gets so loud it overheats, sparks, turns into a fire. Mika is on fire in Kira’s brain, and it’s all fear – except for the parts that are determination, and anger, and love. Oh that fear. Oh Mika is so scared. And she’s alone, and Kira doesn’t know where she is, and there’s nothing she can do.

She thinks she might vomit, it’s so loud. She sways on her feet a little bit and Mika starts shattering into pieces – Kira has felt this before, Rachel and Helena and her own mom, but not like this. Not all at once. Mika burns and burns and she burns so loud that Kira can’t even feel anyone else anymore, on the tip of her tongue or anywhere. She leans on the side of the car and starts to shake. Mika’s feelings aren’t even feelings now, just a high thin shriek and the center of a fire – which, when you look at it, isn’t really a color at all.

Kira’s mom pulls up in a broken-down car and _lies_ , like Rachel did, Kira can’t focus on it, Kira can’t hold it, Mika hurts so bad, her mom is lying like Rachel did when she was the villain of this story, when she was someone Kira had to fight, it hurts, Mika is burning down, the roof timbers and the beams and the circuits and the muscles and the bones—

Sarah grabs Kira’s arms—

Kira’s brain beats itself against itself and she can’t hold it, mom mom mom somebody—

Mika twisting into herself and throwing herself back up, Mika a million colors, Mika no colors—

Kira is saying words but she doesn’t know what they are, Kira is a computer hurled out of a window and shattering into circuits—

Sarah pushes Kira into the van—

Mika screams into a fever-pitch and then

starts

falling

down—

 

 

 

and then she goes dark.

 

 

 

For real this time. Kira can tell.

 

xviii.

So Kira doesn’t go in the van. So Kira goes home. Sarah’s sadness is huge in Kira’s mind. Sarah’s guilt is bigger. Kira closes her eyes and rests her head against the window. Mika is dead.

It doesn’t feel like anything.

Or: it _shouldn’t_ feel like anything.

Kira wishes it didn’t feel like anything.

Sarah is sad and guilty. Helena is scared and lonely and brave. Cosima is curious, nervous, trying; Alison is scratching along guilty and scared in the corners of Kira’s mind, Rachel is angry. They should all be quiet, just for a second. They should go away and they should let Kira sleep, let Kira be all alone in her head with Mika’s ghost.

They don’t go away. None of them are ever going to go away.

Kira’s eyes are closed and so she lets herself find Rachel. She crouches there, finally, watches Rachel’s anger fold its sharp edges away. She stays there as they go into the house, as Sarah leaves to go cry, as Siobhan tells Kira _pack a bag, love_ , and won’t meet her eyes. Kira works her fingers over her anger, the way she learned to fold gold paper when she was a kid. Back before she got old, and back before she got this angry.

Kira is going with Rachel, now. They’re going to get into the back of a car and Kira can turn to her and say _what do you do when you get mad_ and maybe, of all of them, Rachel will finally know.

 _Like this_ , Rachel will say, and she’ll show Kira how to make her anger into something beautiful. A whole new shape, one that’ll fly away from Kira and make the inside of her head into something lovely.

 _Oh_ , Kira will say, and she’ll get it. She’ll understand. And Rachel will take Kira into DYAD and open up her hand and tip Kira a handful of pills, like teeth that are just teeth, and Kira will swallow them and she will be alone. She’ll sleep, and she’ll dream, and her dreams will just be images on the inside of her head and they won’t mean anything at all.

Upstairs, in the house, Sarah is crying. Downstairs Kira is crying too. But it’s alright, for once: she knows that these tears are her own.

**Author's Note:**

> It’s getting a little
> 
> crowded in here. In my head I mean. It’s  
> getting a little crowded.  
> \--"Untitled," sometimestuesday
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
